Earlier this month, 乌鸦传媒 and San Diego-based partner inewsource reported on Trina Health, a chain of diabetes care clinics providing a controversial regimen of insulin infusions. That investigation focused on Trina's origins and marketing claims and on founder G. Ford Gilbert's business and legal troubles. Now, in this two-part follow-up, we tell the tragic story of a Montana couple who believed those claims and opened their own Trina clinic.
Ron Briggs used to call himself a "good cash cow for the medical industry." That's because every few weeks, an ambulance would rush across the rugged, cowboy town of , sirens blaring, to revive him from a diabetic coma.
His wife, Julie, a strong and mothering woman where Ron is concerned, gets choked up talking about those days, some four years ago. Those days before they found their "miracle" for treating his disease -- the same miracle that would be at the heart of a criminal indictment, embroil them in a lawsuit and lead to their financial ruin.
Ron, then 57, had been struggling with Type 1 diabetes since he was 5. His condition was getting worse, as was his pain and his frustration. As Beaverhead County's coroner and deputy coroner, and owners of the only funeral home in Dillon, Julie and Ron were familiar with the signs of death. They could see them in Ron.
His complexion was gray. He could barely walk; neuropathy in his feet made him feel like he was stepping on glass. He couldn't think straight. The prescription insulin he took didn't seem to keep his blood sugar under control.
His physician recommended pain medication and antidepressants, and told him to watch his diet. He refused to take those pills. Given how much he was on the road for his job, eating healthy meals was, well, impossible in his mind.
So Ron bought a video camera. He staged himself in the back of the mortuary and was practicing goodbye messages to each of his five children when Julie walked in. She was aghast.
"Don't you dare," she yelled, throwing the books in her arms to the floor. She wasn't ready for him to die.
Julie and Ron had been together nearly 20 years, after what Julie described as nasty divorces. He was the love of her life, her soulmate, her partner.
She told Ron to go home. And don't wait up.
For hours, Julie searched online for the words "diabetes," "neuropathy" and "pancreas." She even contacted people in Switzerland and Germany, anywhere she saw treatments for diabetes.
At some point in the middle of the night, she found what looked to be an answer.
"Trina."
Too good to be true
Dillon is a flat, 1.76-square-mile town, population about 4,200, in southwestern Montana in a county with far more cows than people. It's nestled in Beaverhead Valley, about 100 miles -- as the crow flies -- northwest of Yellowstone Park. bounce across the landscape on windy days.
Its remoteness is its attraction. The nearest city with more than 30,000 people is Butte, an hour's drive away, weather permitting.
Dillon boasts two intersections with stop lights. Years ago a hay truck knocked down a third, but no one saw the need to put it back. The town has at least 11 active churches, and it seems everybody knows everybody else.
A downside of life in a remote town can be limited options. Ron wasn't happy with his health care. Julie figured there were better remedies to keep her husband alive that Dillon's tight-knit medical community hadn't considered.
As she searched online that night, Julie scoured the website for and its "." She read about a series of insulin infusions said to improve the body's ability to metabolize carbohydrates, resolving multiple complications from diabetes. The website said Sacramento lawyer G. Ford Gilbert developed the infusion protocol.
Gilbert claimed that the treatments alleviated his daughter Trina's complications from Type 1 diabetes, saving her life 30 years ago. Gilbert's daughter said she's still healthy today because of weekly Trina infusions.
Julie urged her husband to call Trina Health. Now.
Ron said a clinic manager named Danny in Trina's Sacramento headquarters got on the phone. He called him "Mr. Briggs," Ron said, and assured him that 100% of their patients "claim they feel better."
It sounded too good to be true.
But it was 2014 and Julie and Ron were desperate. Trina treatments were offered at a clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. BlueCross BlueShield of Montana, the mortuary's health plan, would pay for them.
Julie flew with her husband to Scottsdale.
Trina believers
Getting to the Scottsdale clinic meant a 15-hour trip: a two-hour drive to the Bozeman, Montana, airport, a change of planes to Phoenix, and a rental car to a Scottsdale hotel.
Each of Ron's Trina treatment sessions lasted four hours and involved an intravenous, pulsed infusion of insulin. Ron sat in a recliner, drinking a glucose beverage at certain intervals and then undergoing tests that measured how he was metabolizing carbohydrates.
It was the fourth trip to Arizona when Ron, by then managing the trek alone, decided he couldn't live without Trina.
"You're supposed to have some exercise right after the treatment, and I was in the swimming pool at the hotel ... bobbing up and down," he said. "I finally went over to the edge of the pool and I had tears in my eyes."
He said he called Julie on his cellphone and told her he didn't know how he would manage such long trips each week, but he needed to keep coming back.
"My vision started clearing up. And my head started working better, thinking-wise. And then all of a sudden, I just, as a whole, my energy level went up and I started feeling better."
Trina "was like a miracle, a godsend," Julie said.
It seemed like everyone in Dillon noticed: Ron was a new man. And that got Ron and Julie wondering, why can't Trina Health come to their town?
Julie put a "Please Help" notice in the local newspaper, , urging readers to call Trina Health in Sacramento. It asked readers to let the clinic "know that you support us getting a clinic in our community, either for Ron or if you know anyone that could benefit from the treatment."
Ron and Julie Briggs on Dec. 1, 2017, at their funeral home in Dillon, Montana. (Photo credit: Brandon Quester/inewsource)
As coroners and funeral home owners in a small town, Ron and Julie have a lot of friends. Julie estimated "probably hundreds" of people around Beaverhead County called Trina's Sacramento office.
As it happened, Gilbert was in an expansion mode. In June 2014, web archives for Trina Health show were operating in six states.
Gilbert is an attorney. But he told 乌鸦传媒/inewsource that people call him "Doctor Gilbert," because he has a PhD, which his says is in health sciences. He said he received it from the online Ashley University.
He has been his company's biggest promoter and salesman.
In interviews, Gilbert can talk nonstop for hours about Trina, barely taking a breath. He gets agitated and even angry at any suggestion that Trina Health isn't the best thing for people with diabetes since the discovery of insulin in 1921.
The infusion puts "extra energy back into the cells," Gilbert said, adding that it saves lives for people with diabetes, and any other condition related to "metabolic dysfunction," including prediabetes.
Gilbert and his Trina Health website , too. They say the infusions restore kidney function, reduce congestive heart failure and improve heart function.
It relieves gastrointestinal fatigue, increases energy in patients with chronic fatigue or muscle fatigue and reduces hypertension in 90 days, they say. Gilbert said some women undergo Trina infusions to improve their sexuality, and for men the procedure can reverse erectile dysfunction.
All impressive claims, Ron and Julie thought.
Ron remembered exactly the moment Gilbert responded to the Dillon residents' pleas. He was in Scottsdale and had just finished his treatment when his cellphone rang.
Gilbert told him his Sacramento phones were "ringing off the hook" with eager patients, Ron recalled.
"I'm going to tell you what," Ron recalled Gilbert saying. "Let's put a Trina in Dillon."
To get it set up, Ron and Julie would need to pay Gilbert about $300,000. They were prepared to do whatever it took.
The couple's determination brought them into a network of investors and clinicians who each paid Gilbert and his company hundreds of thousands of dollars to open Trina Health clinics in 17 cities. If the upfront costs at other clinics were on par with what the Briggses paid, Gilbert has collected millions.
It's unclear what investors knew before they made their deals with Gilbert. Were they aware of his reputation with leading medical groups? His battles with Medicare and private insurance companies? Did they see the infusion as a medical miracle, or did they primarily see their clinic as an opportunity for profit?
They certainly didn't imagine that in early 2018, Gilbert would be at the center of a political corruption scandal, accused of bribery and healthcare fraud.
Snake oil?
Julie and Ron were business people, but they'd never run a medical clinic. So they asked for help from leaders at , an 18-bed facility a mile from the couple's house where emergency room physicians had so often revived Ron from a diabetic coma.
Initially, Ron and Julie said hospital officials seemed interested.
But weeks passed. Nothing happened.
Those administrators had handed over Ron and Julie's proposal to the hospital's medical staff, to physicians who would see what the evidence was and whether Trina really could help their patients.
They had a meeting. It did not go well.
The couple recalled that one of the physicians told them straight out: If Ron Briggs thought this treatment was helping him, "it's a placebo." It was all in his head.
Some Dillon physicians used words like "scam," "fraud" and "snake oil." One patient's physician promised to drop him if he went to the Trina clinic, the Briggses said.
Ron didn't buy it. Those medical naysayers were just nervous, he said, afraid that if Trina Health came to town, their patients with diabetes would no longer need their services.
"Less ambulance runs, less need for the doctor, less need for the hospital. Guess what? This will cost that hospital money," Ron said with disgust. "It breaks my heart that the almighty dollar is more important."
Physicians Sandra McIntyre and John Madany remembered that time very differently. They said they did their best, studying and talking about Trina Health for weeks, and were respectful to Ron and Julie, even though, as physicians, they couldn't see how Trina reversed diabetes complications.
"There's nothing about what they're describing that makes physiologic sense," McIntyre said. "At the end of the day, that's our job. Our job is to make sure that we vet that kind of treatment. That we vet: Does it make sense? Is there data to support this? Could it cause harm? And then, in the context of Medicare dollars, is this money well spent?"
Their conclusion: "This treatment -- we don't see anything to suggest that this is money well spent for anybody."
McIntyre said, "The consensus among our entire medical group was, let's not ... And our administrative leadership appropriately said, if the medical providers aren't interested, we as an organization aren't interested."
It's common for patients to seek out unproven remedies such as hemp oil, and that's fine as long as they're willing to pay for it with their own money, Madany said. What made the Trina infusion different is that federal Medicare dollars and private insurance were paying for it.
That attitude infuriated Ron and Julie. They grew to distrust physicians associated with Barrett Hospital.
Gilbert and Trina Health's corporate leaders reassured them the infusion was legitimate, with no complications. Besides, Medicare and private insurance were covering it, the couple was told, so it must be OK.
Ron and Julie decided to go it alone.
Tomorrow: "Duped."